Four Trays of Chickadees

My wife asked me to make her a tray for her birthday ….. with a chickadee on a branch. This is in my mind at least a very overworked theme in marquetry but I agreed to give it a shot. I at least wanted it to look lifelike so I started a search of images on Google where I found this one.

I imported it to inkscape, did a nice tracing, retooling the branch for artistic effect, and added a few other branches and some faint terrain and sky to fill out the area. “How do you like this?” I asked, proudly showing her my drawing. ” I like the bird” she said, ” but lose the other branches and the landscape. All I want is a bird on a branch.” “As you wish my dear.” I said (or some fairly similar expression) .........and so just a bird on a branch it became. When all is said and done I have to admit (begrudgingly) that in this case at least, less may have actually been more. I quite like the little guys.

The marquetry is quite simple as the pieces are larger than what I’ve been doing lately so I decided to cut them in classic style and get a few extras, after all you don’t have much more cutting to do … and it is a bit more challenging. The marquetry itself was done quite quickly. What took me way too much time was the silly idea of having round inside corners. I guess it looks nice but it presented a new problem (opportunity) at every stage.

The veneers in the backgrounds are mostly maple in one figure or another plus a piece of what I’m guessing is a burl-ish redwood. The marquetry veneers are ipe, holly, fir, oak and the redwood for one branch. Two of them have legs like my music motif tray and the other two sit right down on their bases.

Beautiful work Paul. I really like the pine cones on the sides, they add a nice touch. One nice thing for your wife is that when she asks for something with marquetry on it there’s a good chance she’ll get four!

-- Paul--- Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep. — Scott Adams